Books, Literary Curiosities, Vikings

Grettir and the UFO

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Outlaws. Horse Stealing. Rounding up a posse. Vigilante Justice. Feuds. Anti-heroes who walk tall, take no shit, give no fucks, and get into fights at the slightest insult. 

The Wild West right?

Nope.

Meet Grettir, the 10th century “hero” of the Icelandic Grettir’s Saga. Outlawed, twice, first for killing the man in a fight over a perhaps-stolen food bag, second accidentally burning down a house with 12 people in it. Along the way, he tears the arm off of a troll invading a hall, and dives to a cave under a waterfall and kills another one (Beowulf, anyone?). His biggest battle is killing Glam, an Icelandic zombie (draugr, in Old Norse) who is haunting a farm. Grettir is larger than life, both in reputation as well as physical size. His life ends when (spoiler alert) he’s living on the Island fortress of Drangey, gets a witchcraft-infected wound, and is then overcome by his enemies and killed. 

I’ve been reading Grettir in advance of an upcoming trip to Iceland. I was curious about Grettir as the hero of the saga, as he’s not an entirely sympathetic character (that’s Icelandic understatement). As a child he kills the geese his father make him take care of, partially flayed the horse his father made him take care of, and badly scratched his father’s back with a rake when his father made him scratch his back. Yet, he is somewhat of a national hero in Iceland, it’s said that more place names in Iceland are named after him than any other saga character. 

Looking around for analogs, I was thinking about the outlaws of the Wild West, like, say, Billy the Kid. His first arrest at age 16 was for stealing food, an odd parallel to Grettir’s first killing over a food bag.  Before the Kid had turned 21, he’d killed eight people. In contrast to Grettir, the Kid traveled in a pack, joining a posse called the Regulators nominally tasked with a executing a kind of “civilian” justice (oh the irony). (By the way, the word regulated in those days meant something more like well-functioning, in good working order or well-managed, rather than “controlled by government regulations”, 2nd Amendment students take note). Caught and convicted for murder by Sheriff Pat Garrett, the Kid escaped jail, and went on the run. Tracked down by Garrett, the Kid was killed near Fort Sumner, NM. 

Here’s where it gets weird. I’ve been experimenting with a location-based history app – one that will tell you the history of a particular location and places of interest near you. Randomly, looking for historical data, this page popped up: https://www.historynet.com/the-man-who-invented-billy-the-kid-book-review.htm. It’s an article about (this is gonna get a little meta), the man who wrote the biography of the person who was the ghost-writer for Pat Garrett’s biography of Billy the Kid. That person was Ash Upson. From the article:

Ash wrote that Garrett, “in addition to being long-headed…is likewise long-legged, his full height being somewhat under 10 feet.” In the previous decade Upson claimed to have met young Henry Antrim (the future William H. Bonney, alias Billy the Kid) at the Silver City boardinghouse run by the boy’s mother, Catherine Antrim. That might not be true, but the author confirms Upson “did meet Bonney in Roswell, the small hamlet which Ash had a hand in protecting during the Lincoln County War.”

OK, so Garrett was apparently also Grettir-sized, but that’s not the fun part. Roswell? Roswell NM? Where a UFO crashed in 1947? Yep. 66 years almost to the day after the Kid’s death, a weather balloon UFO will crash in Roswell[1]. The aliens came for Billy the Kid, we just never knew. Henry McCarty, aka Billy the Kid, is buried in Old Fort Sumner Cemetery. 

Grettir? Well, after his death his killers cut off his head for proof (to get the reward), and took it back to the Althing ( the Icelandic parliament ) to claim their reward. Incensed at the disrespect of cutting off Grettir’s head, and the use of witchcraft to kill him, the Althing in turn outlawed Hook, Grettir’s killer (Grettir would eventually be avenged by his kinsman Thorstein Galleon, who killed Hook in Constantinople).

Grettir was buried twice, once in Reykjastrang, then when the church was moved, he was buried in his hometown of Bjarg (legendary location here).

 

Books, Bookship, Favorites, The Hawaii Project

My book projects

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No secret to anyone that knows me, that I love books.

What might be a secret are the number of books-related projects I’ve made over the years. I thought it would be fun to collect them all.

The Hawaii Project

The one that started it all. After I left Telenav, after the goby acquisition, I wanted to work on books. So I built The Hawaii Project, a personalized Book Recommendation engine.

Try it out, here.

Bookship

Bookship is a social reading app. A virtual book club app. Read a book with your friends, family or book club, and keep in touch while you do it.

Get it here.

What Should I Read Next?

Using the recommendations engine from The Hawaii Project, I built an Alexa skill you can talk to, and get book recommendations. (Three years later, Amazon copied me and released their own What Should I Read Next … grr….). Get mine here.

BookTrap

BookTrap is a trapper / keeper for books you find on the web. It’s a Chrome extension. When you’re on a page and an interesting book is mentioned, hit the BookTrap button. We’ll scan the page and find the books mentioned, which you can then add to your account to remember them.

Get it here.

Book Roulette

Book Roulette shows you an interesting new book each time you open a new tab in Chrome (or Brave!). Another Chrome extension. Get it here.

Codexmap

It’s defunct, but it plotted book locations on a google map.

Book Playlist

Build Spotify playlists for books. Featured on Product Hunt! (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/book-playlist). Since subsumed into The Hawaii Project.

Books, Literary Curiosities, Ruminations

The paths of discovery

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I am always fascinated by the paths to discovery, the chance happening onto something you didn’t know existed yet always wanted. It’s been a thread, without my really realizing it, of much of my career, from leading the team building the Endeca discovery engine, to the goby “things to do” discovery app, to The Hawaii Project, a book discovery engine, and to an as-yet-unnamed music discovery system I have been building in my head.

Yesterday’s discovery path was sufficiently amusing I thought I’d write it down.

I have a thing for cocktails. And books. And cocktail books :). I have a cocktail book running around in my head I want to write some day, so I’m periodically surfing the web looking at or for interesting cocktail recipes. I was looking for a recipe for homemade Grenadine (pomegranate juice and sugar, basically) and stumbled upon the following article.

Want to drink like the immortal author Ernest Hemingway?

Drink like Hemmingway with his most intriguing cocktail invention: the Death in the Afternoon Cocktail.

Amongst other interesting tidbits, I found this interesting cocktail:

Journalist, explorer, occultist, and infrequent cannibal William Seabrook created the Asylum, consisting of one part gin, one part Pernod, and a dash of grenadine (poured over ice, but not shaken). He said it would “look like rosy dawn, taste like the milk of Paradise, and make you plenty crazy.”

Wait what? sometime-cannibal? WTF? I had to go read more about this person. (yes, I made this Homeric-sounding cocktail, and…one ounce of Pernod is A LOT. VERY anise flavored. The things we do in the name of science….Interesting cocktail, not an everyday drink, but interesting. )

So, a quick glimpse at Seabrook on Wikipedia yields a very intriguing character. Turns out he was a writer and occultist, a friend of the well-known Aleister Crowley. And yes, a sometime-cannibal. With an apparent penchant for bondage.

William Buehler Seabrook (February 22, 1884 — September 20, 1945) was an American occultist, explorer, traveler, cannibal, and journalist, born in Westminster, Maryland. 

and

…In the 1920s, Seabrook traveled to West Africa and came across a tribe who partook in the eating of human meat. Seabrook writes about his experience of cannibalism in his novel Jungle Ways; however, later on Seabrook admits the tribe did not allow him to join in on the ritualistic cannibalism. Instead, he obtained samples of human flesh from a hospital and cooked it himself.

His book The Magic Island, based on his travels in Haiti, is credited with the introduction of the “zombie” to popular culture (the undead creature, not the cocktail!).

Later in life, he committed himself to an institution for the treatment of severe alcoholism, and wrote a book about his experience called (you guessed it) Asylum, whence the name of his cocktail. 

And then I found the real nugget: “In Air Adventure he describes a trip on board a Farman with captain Renè Wauthier, a famed pilot, and Marjorie Muir Worthington, from Paris to Timbuktu, where he went to collect a mass of documents from Father Yacouba, a defrocked monk who had an extensive collection of rare documents about the obscure city at that time administered by the French as part of French Sudan. The book is replete with information about French colonial life in the Sahara and pilots in particular.”

Now, one of the best books I’ve ever read is Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, simultaneously a philosophical exploration as well as an exciting adventure story, describing his flight through the Sahara, his eventual crash and escape. So Air Adventure is ringing some bells…I track down a copy of Air Adventure. Here’s the opening paragraph:

It was only when the sandstorm rose up from the Great Sahara, ripped us down out of the pretty sky, and taught us that it could make skeletons out of airplanes as easily as camels, that we really began to get acquainted with the desert, or to take it or ourselves seriously.

Pretty promising. And such a strange path to discovery, of a book I should have known existed! Air Adventure was published in 1933; Wind Sand and Stars in 1939, so Seabrook pre-dates Saint-Exupéry, but cannot find any evidence they knew of each other.

In 1945, Seabrook died by suicide — an overdose of sleeping pills. Maybe I won’t be making more of those Asylums after all. 

Career, Favorites, Startups

How to sound spontaneous when you pitch

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(this is a repost of something I wrote a long time ago on LinkedIn)

Bookship was very fortunate to be selected by The Bookseller as one of six candidates for BookTech Company of the Year. Super exciting; great validation; great reason to go to London :).

As part of the event, each candidate gets 5 minutes to pitch, hard stop at 5 minutes.

Now, 5 minutes is tricky. Too short for much in the way of slides. Too long to just stand there and talk — you’ll forget stuff. I decided to go for the “pretty picture” school of slides, to keep me on track — but I wasn’t going to read my slides.

Afterwards, I received a very nice compliment from one of the other companies — “you were great! You were so natural and spontaneous!”. I was flattered. But my pitch was anything but spontaneous. It was very carefully crafted to sound spontaneous.

I’m aware of two ways to sound spontaneous and natural when pitching:

  1. Be amazingly, magically spontaneous (some people do have this gift; I do not).
  2. Do The Work. (with a nod to Steven Pressfield’s book)

Here’s my methodology to Do The Work for a five minute pitch.

  1. Start 2 weeks ahead of time.
  2. Pick a story narrative — what’s your angle on why you’re unique.
  3. Outline your pitch in slide bullet points. Max 5 slides (my slide outline below).
  4. Make slides with pictures and few words — like, use 32pt font.
  5. Talk out loud — really — out loud — in your own words, for each of those items. Record it or write it down verbatim. Hone it so it’s short enough and you can say it without tripping over your tongue.
  6. Every morning, for 2 weeks up to the event, spend 5 minutes and just read your notes out loud. Out loud. Not in your head. Out loud. Maybe record it. By the end of the first week, you probably won’t need your notes.
  7. On day 0, you’ll sound natural and spontaneous and you won’t need to see your slides.

Here’s my 5 slides outline:

  1. Why this vision/company/product/market. (in the spirit of “Start with Why”).
  2. What is this thing? (what does the product do, focus on interesting/different)
  3. The Business — how do you make money. Keep it simple.
  4. The Team (why will this team succeed?).
  5. Restate the Why (focus on “inevitability”- along the lines of Tom Tunguz’s http://tomtunguz.com/inevitability/).

The words for each of these slides should be 3–5 sentences, max. More and you’re out of time.

I think steps 5 and 6 are the key. People’s speaking voices and writing voices are different. Speaking out loud means your pitch is natural to how you speak, not how you write. Refine your words, boil it down so it fits in your time slot and you can say it out loud without tripping over your tongue.

One of the things you learn from playing an instrument is that a few minutes of practice a day is way better than 1 hour a week all at once. Harness this — just spend that 5–10 minutes in the morning when you are fresh and in a week the words will be stuck in your head.

Repetition and brevity are your friends. People can’t read your slides and you shouldn’t either. Convey the key points simply and clearly and they will fill in the details themselves.

And smile while you talk!

Books, Ruminations

What lasts?

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So, my sister was digging through the archives and discovered that our 6th great grandfather, Evan Watkins, built and owned Watkins Ferry which crosses the Potomac River where it divides Maryland and West Virginia (which I did not even know were adjacent). We have been up and down the east coast with family stuff, and yesterday we decided to detour over and take a look.

There’s no ferry any more obviously – there is a bridge which crosses from Williamsport, MD, into West Virginia. On the (now) West Virginia side, there’s an historical marker, which you can see in the photo, as well as what’s left of the house, known as Maidstone-on-the-Potomac.

It was raining pretty hard, and so after a few quick pictures we sat in the car at the side of the road looking around. I was startled out of my reverie by someone tapping on my window. It was a local woman who stopped to see if we needed any help – a reasonable guess, why else would anyone be sitting here?!). And isn’t it nice to know there are people like that still around! I explained why we were there, and she said “oh my goodness, I can’t believe it!” and launched into short speech, she was really into the history of the area and really seemed impressed that we had come.

I felt briefly and absurdly famous.

It got me thinking about what lasts. In philosophical approach I’m a Stoic – “memento mori“, Marcus Aurelius, and all that. So, I do think about death, and recent events have me thinking about it more. What will people remember about me? about you? If you have a family, you live on through your family, and they remember. But that usually only lasts a few generations. I remember my grandfather, but I expect nobody alive remembers much of my great grandfather. That Ferry, well, people remember. It was there. It’s marked. It’s a piece of history.

I write software. I look at it as a creative act, not unlike writing a novel. But software is ephemeral. Rarely does a piece of software matter for more than, say, a decade. The writer James Salter (whose work I admire very much) said:

There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.

James Salter, Don’t Save Anything.

I suppose I need to get started on that book that’s been running around in my head.

Books, Startups, Travel, Search, Music